System hard lockup during shutdown

[cronomorfo]

Hello.
This is my first real foray into Linux. I'm running Debian 9 Stable.

A month or so ago I installed the OS, but recently I realized that the system never shut down completely unless I turned off the device by pressing the hardware power button. I've seen a couple of error messages in the shutdown sequence but I don't know how to recover them.

My impression is that this might be a firmware issue, yet I'm a bit over my head in technical terms trying to solve this issue alone, that's why I'm coming here to the Beginners. I don't even know where should I be looking inside the hood of Debian in order to give appropiate info on how to proceed.

[Bulkley]

Yeah, I've seen that. There's a black screen and you can hear the fan running. No clues. Linux has a soft shutdown procedure.

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SysRq REISUO

See here. For reboot use

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SysRq REISUB

Test it to make sure it's working on your system.

I assume you are shutting down using the provided GUI. As a test try doing in a terminal

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shutdown -h now

Watch for errors.

I'm thinking that when you have this problem you have left a program running and the shutdown process is having trouble closing it. A browser maybe?

[sunrat]

This will be much easier to diagnose by reading journal logs.
Enable persistent journal by creating a directory as root or sudo:

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mkdir -p /var/log/journal

Then you can read the journal after the next boot with

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journalctl -b -1 -p 3

-b -1 means show for the previous boot
-p 3 means only show error messages with priority 3

Post the results here.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=140648

Please search the boards before posting.

[cronomorfo]

Thanks for your feedback. I'm not aware of what I did but the behavior seems to have stopped. I remember unchecking a box for journal saving in the GUI settings and I guess that did the trick.

Sorry for missing that out, Head_on_a_Stick, I thought that the most reasonable path for solving this issue was actually asking for diagnostic tools/commands instead of going around mindlessly changing settings.